'Man on Wire'--4 stars (excellent): Long-ago prank now a homage

On a misty day in August 1974, 1,350 feet above the Manhattan streets, French wire-walker Philippe Petit spent 45 minutes gliding back and forth between the south and the north towers of the World Trade Center, eight crossings in all. " Man on Wire" captures the renegade artistry and poetic audacity of Petit's performance. The film itself is perfectly poised between artistry and audacity. It's beautiful.

For the record: Robert Zemeckis ("Forrest Gump," "Beowulf") is developing a feature film based on Petit's life and high crimes. Good luck to all concerned, but I can't see how a fictionalized treatment could exceed the achievement of director James Marsh's documentary, which unfolds like a dream—everyone interviewed for the film, most of all Petit, speaks constantly of the dreamlike nature of the enterprise and of Petit's quixotic ambitions—wrapped up in a heist film.

Before 1974 Petit managed several impressive wire-walking feats, including a 1971 stroll on a high-wire strung between the towers of Notre Dame in Paris. Sitting in the dentist's office one day, Petit was leafing through a newspaper and then he saw it: a drawing of the World Trade Center towers, not yet built. As his lover and eventual co-conspirator Annie Allix says on camera, Petit eventually found he "could no longer carry on living without having at least tried to conquer those towers."

How did he do it? For one thing, he was miraculously lucky. He and his key cohorts found ways to make several exploratory forays to the top of the towers. They disguised themselves as French journalists, snapping pictures here and there on the sly, the better to rig their equipment properly under the cloak of night. Director Marsh, whose previous works include the artful if facile docu-fantasia " Wisconsin Death Trip," plays up the espionage and heist-thriller aspects of Petit's unlikely gang, which included French citizens, a few Americans and an Australian. "Man on Wire" makes sure each piece of the plan clicks into place, without getting wonky about it. We get to know Petit and comrades well, through a wealth of home movies depicting their training exercises back in France. The stark black-and-white re-enactments set in and around the towers transcend the usual fakery. Marsh's filmmaking instincts are unerring.

At the expense of several close friendships, Petit became a superstar very quickly, during and after those 45 minutes. (He also had sex with a groupie hours after the high-wire act—which, honestly, you have to admire: It's the only thing that could've added to the experience.) The stars of the film, inevitably, are the towers themselves. Never beloved, the World Trade Center buildings were somehow humanized by Petit's insane act of homage, which, from the historical perspective, acts as a bookend to the vicious act of terrorism targeting them 27 years later. When "Man on Wire" first shows us still photographs of Petit atop one of the towers, on an exploratory visit, the perspective is shocking. It too seems to be a dream, because of what happened Sept. 11, 2001, a day never mentioned in this movie. The film is scored to the tense, propulsive music of Michael Nyman, best known for Peter Greenaway's films and for "The Piano." The "Man on Wire" score also deploys Erik Satie and Edvard Grieg, to glorious effect. Thanks to "My Dinner with Andre" and now this sublime documentary, Satie's "Gymnopedie No. 1" captures a certain, ineffable strain of New York melancholy better than any other music could.